The Man In Our Memory

By Doris Kearns Goodwin

Published: February 17, 2003

CONCORD, Mass.—
Carved on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial are these words: ''In this Temple, as in the hearts of the people, for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.''

As we celebrate Lincoln on this President's Day, nearly two centuries after his birth, his memory is clearly ''enshrined forever'' in our hearts. Yet, for Lincoln, the inscription marks the fulfillment of a lifelong dream that through much of his life he feared would never be realized -- the desire to achieve, through his own acts, what the Greeks called kleos, the glory that won lasting remembrance in the minds of his fellow citizens.

Politics established an early hold on Lincoln. At age 23, after residing for only six months in the small town of New Salem, Ill., he decided to run for the state legislature. The statement he published to announce his candidacy revealed both his fierce ambition -- and his doubts.

''Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,'' he wrote. ''I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed.'' Should he lose, he confessed, he had ''been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.'' And, not surprisingly, when the votes were tallied, the little-known Lincoln found that he had lost.

He ran again two years later, and this time, he won, beginning the first of four successive terms in the state Legislature. But the era did not seem ripe for memorable deeds. In a speech delivered to the Young Men's Lyceum in Springfield, Ill., when he was 28, he lamented that his generation did not face the same historic challenges that had confronted the founding fathers -- that ''forest of giant oaks,'' he called them, who had built ''a political edifice of liberty and equal rights,'' and had thus become immortalized, ''their names . . . revered and sung, and toasted through all time.'' He feared that since the ''field of glory'' had already been ''harvested,'' only small ambitions beckoned to his generation.

Lincoln still felt this way three years later, when, at the age of 31, he fell into a crippling depression. The situation was so serious that his friends, fearing he was suicidal, watched over him and took the razors, knives and sharp items from his room. ''I am now the most miserable man living,'' he confessed. ''Whether I shall ever be better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible; I must die or be better.''

The immediate event that set off Lincoln's depression, most historians agree, was his broken engagement to Mary Todd. The episode left him devastated, not only because he had hurt Mary, but also because he had long considered his ability to keep his word ''the chief gem of [his] character.'' Now he could no longer trust himself in that regard.

But in that melancholy winter, he was suffering from the failure of ambition as well as love. Throughout his career in the state legislature, he had championed government support for a series of public projects to construct bridges, roads and harbors so that people living in isolated rural areas could bring produce to market. He believed, as he said later, that the ''leading object'' of government was to ''lift artificial weights from all shoulders . . . to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.'' But when a sustained recession hit the state in the late 1830's, his beloved projects were stopped in midstream, and the state itself fell into bankruptcy. As a major proponent of the costly system that had contributed to Illinois's travails, Lincoln received a significant share of the blame. Now, beyond his sadness over a lost love, he carried the added burden of a damaged reputation, and forlorn hopes for the future.

As Lincoln's spirits continued to sink, his best friend, Joshua Speed, went to his side and, in a conversation both men would remember as long as they lived, warned Lincoln that if he did not rally, he would most certainly die. Lincoln replied that he was more than willing to die, except that ''he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.''

Even in this moment of despair, it was Lincoln's ambition to accomplish something that would leave the world ''a little better for my having lived in it'' that carried him forward. It wasn't simply a desire for power or popularity. It was something more profound -- the yearning to establish an admirable reputation on earth.

Despite Lincoln's deepening belief in an all-powerful God as he grew older, he was not free from doubt about the existence of an afterlife. It was this uncertainty, Robert V. Bruce argues in his essay ''The Riddle of Death,'' that further fueled Lincoln's passion to live on in the minds of others. Though Lincoln could include an ambiguous reference to life after death in a comforting letter to his dying father, there is no clear evidence in his vast public and private writings that he himself believed in heavenly rest.